notes from underground

Here’s the link to my final project on YouTube, and here’s an embedded version:

Enjoy!

I woke up at 4pm on Sunday, and turned in the beast at 9AM this morning– I think that means that of the past sixty-five hours, only six of them were spent sleeping. I can’t pretend I’ve been working 100% constantly, but I’ll be damned if it hasn’t been close. We’ve been through Hell and high water, but my “Typebot” animation project is now complete! There are tons of niggling little problems I want to go in and fix, but the project is more than presentable and I think it looks pretty awesome. A Youtube link will go up once the clip “premiers” at Thursday’s wrap party and class reel screening.

So that’s it, huh? That project was my final undergraduate work. I’ve got a critique with the professor and teaching assistants this afternoon, and then I’m done with college. Weird feeling.

But in the meantime, TO BED!

The first final renders from my animation final project are in! After a surprising turn of events last night, this project has gone from being my second-to-last project to being my final undergraduate project ever. Fairly momentous, though also somewhat daunting… all the more so because the deadline I am racing to meet is in a meager four hours, and I’m only done rendering one shot! You’d think I’d have more to show, I started weeks ago and in this final run-up to the deadline I’ve been awake and working on this for roughly 40 hours. At least the other (cooler) shots should be done in good time to present them at the screening and wrap party on Thursday.

Anyway, here’s the image:

Image links to a higher-res version… it’s a pity the depth map shadows are such low quality, but any higher and it would have been going significantly slower.

I’m getting pretty close on my final project. Here’s a preview of what is to come!

John Gaeta, on Speed Racer:

We felt that the pivotal barrier in moving toward more expressive, less real, visuals was the perception that today’s audiences require photorealism from their effects in order to prevent a drastic disconnection from the photographed drama . . . but that notion is really connected to the reality of the story universe itself. The Wachowski’s were aiming at a whole different wavelength of narrative which they were attempting to port from their childhood imaginations. Besides, we wanted to have fun, and we wanted to do it across an entire picture.
Thus, we attempted to devolve away from the techniques of precision integration of all live and fx elements and evolve toward a more emotional-graphic underscoring of moments. Like things were done in older days of animation, before computers.

Overly wordy to be sure, and I can’t say how well I think they succeeded until I’ve seen the movie next week, but the man hit the nail on the head: photoreal effects shouldn’t necessarily be the target. If your audience goes in expecting to be transported beyond normal “photographed drama,” as in films like The Matrix, Sin City and evidently Speed Racer, they will be willing to buy in to effect that don’t conform to realistic cinema but instead strengthen the visual impact of the film because of the discontinuity and nonconformity between the photographic elements and the effects. Take a risk, and try to take your audience to a place they haven’t been before. Chances are that they will come with you.

Full interview with Gaeta about Speed Racer is available on VRMag’s website.

Motionographer brings us the news that Aardman Animations has teamed up with Animal Planet to do a series of spots on ways to save energy, conserve resources, and laugh a lot as you watch some awesome animated shorts. Check them out!

I’ll leave motionographer.com to deal with most recent motion graphics awesomeness, but I really think that Of Montreal’s Wraith Pinned to the Mist video by Kangaroo Alliance ought to be seen. This was the first animated video Kangaroo Alliance has done, it was featured at ResFest. It’s cute, vaguely hallucinogenic, bizarre through and through, and really cool for all its simplicity. I approve! Also, Of Montreal are worth noting on their own, if it is even possible to have missed them by now.

It’s about time I put something resembling an animation reel up here, so here’s a short reel I’ve cut together:

Animation Reel, Fall 2007

This has no sound, but since I originally updated it I have replaced the out-dated source footage for the knight segments with final renders, cleaned up timing, added captions and put it on youtube!

I’d rather have done a better job, but something’s better than nothing, in this case! Character segments modeled and rendered in Autodesk Maya (Alias, back then), all else done in Maxon’s Cinema 4D. I love Maya’s character tools, and want to learn to leverage that program’s scripting and particle capabilities, but Cinema is so much easier to model in! Hehe. Total personal bias, I also like the flexibility of their NPR Renderer.

On sunday night I was browsing through NoForSeriously.com and found this picture, apparently fanart for something called Popbot. I loved the drawing, and even though the link to the Popbot website was down I used it as an excuse to begin a side project and brush up my Maya skills a bit. By the end of the night I had rendered this:

and just tonight I finished rigging him for basing animation. There are a lot of things I need to work out, and I need to change his head, make the eyes light up, add eye controls and clean up the controls I already have. Here’s the quicktime movie I rendered from Maya, sorry for the low quality but I was having trouble compressing it properly (it’s about 450 kilobytes):

“Dudebot” Animation Sequence 1: Standing Up

LOW MORALE ::: Presents Radiohead Music Video - CREEP

No lie, I think this is the most impressive flash music video I’ve ever seen. I haven’t checked out other stuff by this animation group (called “Monkeehub”), but they have a LOT of Really Awesome-Looking Stuff on their website, http://www.monkeehub.com/. Check them out, by all means!

In other news, I found another awesome Flash animation from